Meet Cycle is a French startup building collaboration tools for product managers that can collect data from different tools, work on the next product iteration, and close the feedback loop with their most engaged customers.
The company has raised a total of $6 million in two funding rounds, including a recent funding round led by Boldstart that closed late last year. The startup is backed by eFounders, a European startup studio specializing in SaaS products. Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures, and 60 Angels have also invested in the company, which is a long list of investors*.
Like many software-as-a-service products, Cycle first acts as a single source of truth. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion, and Google Docs. But you should also check GitHub issues, Intercom messages, etc.
“The problem we are trying to solve is one that all product managers face: Product information is scattered across different products,” said Mehdi Boudoukhane, founder and CEO of Cycle. “As the company scales, we get feedback from our users, our sales team, our customer success team, our marketing team.”
Yet, most of the time, product management becomes a black box. Other teams within the company don’t really know when something will ship, or worse, if the feedback will affect them in any way.
Cycle has built integrations with popular startup products such as HubSpot, Intercom, and Slack. Once everything is in cycle, the product team can organize feedback and group everything related to one feature.
Product managers then use Cycle to create product requirements documents in a rich-text editor that supports embedding. Collaborators who can mention teammates.
“Designers create visuals, developers create code, product managers create documentation,” says Boudoukhane. The idea is that a product manager can spend most of his day on Cycle. A product manager who uses Cycle, on average, spends three hours a day working on the product. Cycle also offers integrations with his Linear, GitHub, or Notion, so product managers don’t have to manually export their docs to other tools.
Image credit: cycle
The worst thing that can happen when you read feedback from a client who has decided to terminate their contract with you is when they say your product has a missing feature…the feature does exist I do. They didn’t know about it.
So when something finally ships, Cycle helps you close the loop with your customers and colleagues. For example, a sales team gets notifications in his HubSpot. “The sales team can then reach out to the client who told them about the feature that just shipped,” Boudoukhane said.
Having a clear line of communication with your customers is a good way to prevent churn and keep customers engaged with your product. Boudoukhane says some companies, such as Capitaine Train and Superhuman, are pretty good at this.
Cycle competes with Productboard and Jira. But with a lightweight, collaborative approach, Cycle hopes to make it easier for everyone in the company to interact with the product in some way, provide feedback, contribute, and build a product-driven company. .
* Some of the individuals who have invested in Cycle are Scott Belsky (founder of Behance), Shreyas Doshi (former product lead at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (director of product management at Google), and Youcef Es-skouri (head of product at Dropbox). , Omar Pera (Product Lead, Meta), David Hoang (VP of Design, Webflow), Jonathan Widawski (CEO, Maze), Mark Pundsack (Former Product VP, GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder, Zenly), Marie Gassée (Former VP Growth at Confluent), Mary Nelson (CCO at Aircall), Olivia Teich (former Product Director at Dropbox), David Apple (former Head of Sales & Customer Success at Notion), Eric Wittman (former CRO at Figma), Sriram Krishnan ( Jeremy Le Van (founder of Sunrise), Brad Menezes (former product director of Datadog), Guy Podjarny (founder of Snyk), Nick Candito (co-founder of Flatfile), Romain David (former head of growth at Tinder) Kyle Parrish (Former Uber Product Manager), VP Sales at Figma. I said it’s a long list.
Image credit: cycle
